March 15 – September 25, 2010

Presented by the Georgia-Pacific Foundation.

The Atlanta Student Movement emerged out of the fight for justice and equality for African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Students from Atlanta University Center schools formed the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights to help define their role in the struggle. On March 9, 1960, student leaders from the AUC schools published “An Appeal for Human Rights,” a full-page advertisement in the Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Journal, Atlanta Daily World, and, eventually, The New York Times.  The appeal was followed by the first organized sit-ins with students from the AUC schools on March 15, 1960. Through collective, nonviolent direct action, African American students in Atlanta successfully challenged Jim Crow laws and, with students throughout the South, triggered one of the most significant movements for social change in America.

Through photographs, documents, videos, and contemporary oral history interviews with Atlanta student leaders, Voices Across the Color Line commemorates the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Atlanta Student Movement. The exhibition celebrates the contributions of the individuals whose bravery, perseverance, and commitment to equality changed the city of Atlanta and our nation.

Voices Across the Color Line is being presented as part of the Atlanta History Center’s Civil War to Civil Rights Series.

Located in the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center, this exhibition is free of charge and open Monday – Saturday, 10:00 AM – 5:30 PM, and Sunday, noon – 5:30 PM. For more information, call 404.814.4000.

Andrew B. Lewis
The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation
Thursday, June 17, 2010
8:00 PM

Through the lives of Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses, Bob Zellner, Julian Bond, Marion Barry, John Lewis, and their contemporaries, The Shadows of Youth provides a carefully woven group biography of the activists who—under the banner of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—challenged the way Americans think about civil rights, politics, and moral obligation in an unjust democracy. A wealth of original sources and oral interviews allows the historian Andrew B. Lewis to recover the sweeping narrative of the civil rights movement, from its origins in the youth culture of the 1950s to the near present.

The teenagers who spontaneously launched sit-ins across the South in the summer of 1960 became the SNCC activists and veterans without whom the civil rights movement could not have succeeded. The Shadows of Youth replaces a story centered on the achievements of Martin Luther King Jr. with one that unearths the cultural currents that turned a disparate group of young adults into, in Nash’s term, skilled freedom fighters. Their dedication to radical democratic possibility was transformative. In the trajectory of their lives, from teenager to adult, is visible the entire arc of the most decisive era of the American civil rights movement, and The Shadows of Youth for the first time establishes the centrality of their achievement in the movement’s accomplishments.